First up, Tim O’Shea interviewed me about Stays Crunchy in Milk for Talking With Tim. Great, fun interview. Somehow over the course of this thing I manage to reference Frank Miller, Zelda, the A-Team and say “That’s how I roll.”

If you don’t know O’Shea, he’s a great writer and nice guy and Talking With Tim is a great site worth reading. Tons of interviews with nifty people. The one before me? Bateman! How cool is that?

Anyway, go read and comment on it and stuff!

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I got a possible offer yesterday that has me bouncing around but I can’t talk about it yet. Which sucks. But! Excited by the chance this could happen.

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So I spent a week with a bum foot, hobbling everywhere, on pain meds, just being miserable. Got almost nothing done, because I just hurt. And now my foot is better. So, of course, I am starting to get sick. Not hardly right, I tell you.

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Things Wrong With Me, episode 60 is up – http://tinyurl.com/mbr5tt

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William Marvin died today. Of Marvin Windows and Doors. You know what they say: As one door closes… OH CRAP IT KILLED MISTER MARVIN!

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Congratulations to those people reading this who have done something that I should congratulate them on, but can’t remember because I am a self-absorbed kinda guy. You rock, and [that thing] was totally radical, dude! I can’t believe you actually [did that thing] the way you [did that thing]! Woo!

Firefox 3.5 removed a feature I used a lot from working. See you used to be able to set it so that links from an external source would open in the current tab but links from within tabs would, if they tried to, open in new tabs. Somehow in 3.5 it is one or the other for everything. Which is messing me up, since I have a program that feeds data to the browser and I don’t want it opening a new tab each time I have to remember to ignore reflex and always right click a link to open it in a new tab. All of which is to say that in gmail, where I used to click a link and it would open in new tab, now I click links like a fool and they open where my gmail was and … argh!

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It is with a sad, sad face I have to tell you I read the new James Morrow book and was … disappointed. I love Morrow, though I don’t read him all the time because he can literally depress me for weeks. But when I give in and read a book by him I am always charmed, entertained and enlightened. And depressed but hey. So I read his new one, Shambling Towards Hiroshima and … it felt like half a book. I loved it, right up until it just ended and I felt like he had forgotten to go anywhere with it. I dunno. I mean it worked, it was going somewhere and then it was over and I really felt abandoned. There’s something missing, some point, some ending, that either I missed or he did. I am willing to believe it was me, but that doesn’t help. Though, seriously, check out his other books.

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This video is awesome:

I love a good t-shirt. No, strike that. I adore a good t-shirt. Recently a friend of mine opened up an online t-shirt store. I kinda groaned. I mean I love my friends and I wanna promote them but what if the shirts sucked? I mean that would be horrible, because I’d wanna say something but I couldn’t and then I wouldn’t wanna promote the store but I would wanna help and…

Luckily these shirts are so grand I want to buy each one and probably will over a period of time. History is Funny is the name of the store. To give you an idea of the shirts:

Dear lord I love these shirts.

(via SF Gate): Motola, an elephant who lost a foot and part of her leg when she stepped on a land mine 10 years ago, happily if tentatively stepped out Sunday after being fitted with an artificial limb.

In her first stroll with the permanent prosthesis, the 48-year-old female walked out of her enclosure for about 10 minutes, grabbed some dust with her trunk and jubilantly sprayed it in the air.

“It has gone very well — she has walked around twice,” said Soraida Salwala, secretary general of the Friends of the Asian Elephant, a private group. “She has not put her whole weight on it yet but she’s OK.”

Motola was injured in 1999 while working at a logging camp near the Myanmar border, a region peppered with land mines after a half-century of insurgency. Her mangled left front foot was subsequently amputated.

Motola had been wearing a temporary device for three years to strengthen her leg muscles and tendons and to prepare her for the permanent prosthesis. Soraida said Motola has otherwise been in fine health and that her once bony frame now weighs more than 3 tons.

Motola’s initial operation used enough anesthetic to floor 70 people — a record noted in the 2000 Guinness Book of World Records.

Contest winners will be notified by email today, I hope. The winners were picked out of my hat, after writing names on slips of paper. I, like a fool, forgot to take pictures of the hat and all. Normally I would. My bad. Anyway! Winners were chosen. Thanks for pre-ordering the novel.

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One of my good friends is in squee relationship-wise and it is so much fun to watch him flail and, well, set fire to his kitchen. You know how it is.

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I have no free time. Now part of this is deadlines and crazy. Part of it is, honestly, my own damn fault. I need to get better still at managing my time and all. Blah.

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I also created a new OH SNAP! image. Why? Because we need more of them, I feel.

Pre-orders for Stays Crunchy in Milk end at midnight EST. This is your last chance to enter the contest and get free art with your purchase of the book. Follow the link in the title of the book.

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Also found this bit of good advice:

APK: Wanna see a pic of an earthworm bigger than your hand?

Marianne: NO THANK YOU!

APK: Ok. Thought I’d ask.

Marianne: GLARE

APK: What? I asked! I didn’t just post a link!

Marianne: Uh-huh.

APK: I coulda! And you woulda clicked it!

Marianne: True.

APK: But I did NOT! Because I am a GOOD PERSON! …ok that was a stretch. I am an OK person MOSTLY.

Marianne: I do think you are a good person. You are not always a NICE person though.

(Do YOU want to see the pic? Click here.)

Kids today, huh? I know, right? They have everything and it’s spoiled them silly. They can’t do research or fix anything. They can’t learn right and expect everything to be handed to them on a platter.

Why in my day…

Shut the fuck up.

Technology is curved. Shit has been getting easier and every generation since the very first have played a round of “in my day.”

“Fuck, Bob, in my day we didn’t HAVE legs and couldn’t breathe air.”

Yeah, we get it. Your grandparents didn’t have the ease of access to cars their kids did, letting them travel so far and wide. Distance didn’t mean as much. Community was going to erode.

And your parents, shit they didn’t have TV the way you did. Holy shit! That will destroy all sense of community! It will raise kids automatically and ruin them forever.

Now your kids have the internet as kids. This will destroy community forever. They will learn to expect information to be handed to them and…

This is not new. It has never been new. It is, in fact, so old it is fucking stupid. Yes, every generation loses some information tat might have seemed necessary to the one before it. Things get easier and so on. But they also gain new things. Think of how much better you can sort massive amounts of data than your parents or grandparents generally can. Think of how you manage multiple data streams. I mean shit.

Everyone loses.

Everyone gains.

That’s the way it works. We lose the ability to breathe underwater one day. We gained the ability to breathe air. Well, not like it was a switch but you see what I mean.

And this isn’t saying everything is for the better but come on.

A friend has a kid who didn’t want to do research for a paper. Expected Google to hand him everything, to the point of not wanting to go through the links and comb for data. Well, shitfuck, ok that can get old for me, too, some nights. But that isn’t the point.

The point is that in my day you went to libraries but some kids just wanted to look it up in an encyclopedia and be done. They wanted it handed to them from the broadest source they had. Or they only wanted to go to one library not two.

And so it goes.

The idea, the feelings, don’t change at all. The external shapes do. Mistaking one for the other doesn’t help.

So yeah. Those damn kids today. Evolving. Finding new problems as they use things in intuitive ways we don’t instantly see, just as did with tech our parents gave us way early. How dare they?

A tshirt on sale FOR ONE DAY ONLY! The Farscape 10th Anniversary T. Yes. Really.

You can buy it here for $18 bucks.

Considering your major? Well now the fine folks at Wellesley College’s Counterpoint Magazine have given you a handy guide that may help your decision:

Yes this chart shows you the percentage of students at Wellesley that are virgins, by major. So if, for example, you really like biology, chances are you will not get to study it … uhm outside the lab … much at all. At least 72% of you won’t. Spanish majors get laid more often than French majors and Computer Science nerds seem to get it on a lot.

Though no one, and I mean no one fucks more than Studio Art majors. It is now a proven fact.